INLSA

Women sort mealies in the famine-stricken village of Kanyopola, Malawi, in this 2002 file photo. The combination of HIV and Aids, food insecurity and a weakened capacity for governments to deliver basic social services has led to a long-term emergency.

A chronic food security crisis has unfolded across southern Africa since early 2000, with many more people than during the 1990s now living “close to the edge” and increasingly unable to absorb shocks or stresses.

Several countries in southern Africa now see large numbers of their population, many dependent on rain-fed farming, barely subsisting at poverty levels in years without shocks, and highly vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather, the economy and government policy.

Understanding the underlying causes of this crisis inevitably means untangling the knot of “multiple stressors” which lie at the root of regional food insecurity, compounded in particular by the Aids epidemic.

Multiple stressors can include any changes that manifest as shocks (floods, job losses, death), or gradual changes (land degradation, deterioration of health-care systems).

Food security, defined here as the success of local livelihood strategies to guarantee access to sufficient food at the household or family level, is only one dimension of a wider livelihood crisis.

The UN, charged with overseeing the unprecedented food aid response in southern Africa between 2001 and 2006, defined the prevailing situation as the “Triple Threat”: The combination of HIV and Aids, food insecurity and a weakened capacity for governments to deliver basic social services has led to the region experiencing an acute phase of a long-term emergency.

When a household is affected by a shock or a stress – for instance, a sudden flood that washes away irrigated fields – temporary adjustments, known as “coping strategies”, become necessary for survival. Research has reiterated the factors that determine a household’s resilience or ability to cope. These include access to resources, household size and composition, access to resources of extended families and the ability of the community to provide support.

If this resilience is diminished, any external “shock”, whether it is due to climatic factors, civil disturbance, or economic mismanagement, becomes increasingly difficult to absorb. In other words, households are finding it more difficult to “cope”.

Using this concept we explore two key potentially harmful implications for households’ and, in particular, children’s future security – the adoption of “erosive” coping strategies to deal with current needs, and the inability to cater for the future.

Recent empirical studies conducted in southern Africa have shown evidence of strategies that risk increasing future vulnerability of children. For example, research reflected in a comparative qualitative study conducted on a rural site in Chikwawa district, Malawi, and a peri-urban site in Amajuba district, South Africa, showed that households reduced food intake and dietary diversity to deal with a lack of food and other stressors, with obvious implications for family members’ health, children’s school attendance and adults’ long term income-earning ability.

Slaughter

Among Malawian households interviewed, selling or slaughtering livestock threatened future food security through diminished ability to “provide for the household”. Moreover, Chikwawa family members’ engagement in more casual work for third parties occurred at the expense of reduced investment in their own land, thus potentially affecting productivity in the long run.

Children in this context were a critical source of labour for households’ own lands, but at the cost of affecting their education at school, thus prefiguring future wage income insecurity or future inability to “engage in modern agriculture practices which require reading and understanding of concepts and instructions”.

Likewise, marrying off daughters at a younger age represented a coping mechanism that, like child labour, reflected a system under severe strain: Young girls were being pulled out of school and made dependent at a very early age, at the possible cost of growing up to be unskilled and uneducated

A consequence of families’ inability to recover sufficiently from the various entwined stressors is that they are unable to move beyond immediate needs to adequately plan or act for the future. Too often short-term demands around basic survival limit choices that might secure the longer-term livelihoods of children. Families affected by these stressors often lack material resources, receive limited external support and have poor access to appropriate services.

A common finding was the scarcity of long-term parental planning, despite caregivers’ strong concerns for the future of their children and awareness of threats to their welfare, and potential strategies.

The common refrain of these “parents” was that they lacked resources and opportunities to make and implement substantive plans to safeguard their family’s future. Notably, they regarded saving for or investing in children’s education (including tertiary education) highly, as education was seen as the key to formal employment and a “better future”. However, they were resigned to the fact that they could not carry this out unless their financial situation was to change. This finding was echoed in a study conducted with mothers or female caregivers across three provinces in South Africa.

Despite expressed anxiety about their children’s future, very few parents living with HIV make plans or provisions for their children’s future. While decisions around living arrangements are often related to socio-cultural factors, as well as civil, religious and customary law, financial vulnerability and weakening extended family networks are significant constraints to succession planning, especially in the context of a generalised HIV/Aids epidemic.

This suggests that there is cause for concern about the future well-being of children in southern Africa. Families are often unable to recover sufficiently from the many “entwined” stressors they are exposed to, representing their “external” vulnerability, with the result that they are struggling to adequately plan and act to provide their children with the means to achieve a stable existence.

The challenge, as far as responses are concerned, is that by pulling at one strand of the knot of stressors, one only entangles this situation further. Understanding and responding to the widespread livelihoods crisis requires looking at the complexity of these multiple stressors, to try to comprehend their interconnections and causal links.

A clear argument has emerged for more comprehensive interventions that are sustainable and enabling for families to underpin livelihoods and children’s security. This becomes particularly important when looking at the extended time scale of the Aids epidemic in southern Africa.

By increasing the resilience and range of options that families have, through services and safety nets, one can optimise the positive outcomes for children. Policies need to focus more on promoting children’s physical and psychological well-being, and the capacity and stability of their families. They need to address both their external vulnerability, by alleviating stressors threatening households, as well as their internal vulnerability, by strengthening their resilience or ability to cope.

Decisive, well-informed and holistic interventions should aim to break the potential negative cycle that threatens the stable future well-being of southern Africa’s children.

* Drimie is an associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University. Casale is a doctoral candidate with the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town.